Upon receipt of an e-mail containing contact data such as an e-mail address and/or an associated identifier (e.g. a name), and/or upon processing of contact data in a PIM (Personal Information Management) application, communication devices are often caused to thereafter retrieve presence information from social networking sites. For example, upon receipt of an e-mail, determining a type of reply to provide can be challenging and can lead to negative situations if the presence of the sender is unknown. Hence, the communication device can be caused to log-in to a presence server, such as a social networking website, such that the presence of the sender can be determined. This results in inefficient use of computing resources as the communication device is then asked to simultaneously process an e-mail application (and/or an PIM application) while processing an internet browser to retrieve the presence data from the social networking website. This further leads to inefficient use of bandwidth as generally retrieval of presence data from the social networking website involves retrieving irrelevant extraneous data. In instances where the communication device is wireless, this can further lead to increased cost as wireless bandwidth is generally expensive. Further, some presence sites (e.g. Facebook™, MySpace™, Twitter™, etc.) can be blocked at a corporate work site, hence people cannot sign on to access their contact's presence info. A system and method of accessing presence info without actively signing onto the site is preferred.